eDiscovery Daily Blog

• March 22, 2011

 

As emails are sent out to multiple custodians, deduplication (or “deduping”) has become a common practice to eliminate multiple copies of the same email or file from the review collection, saving considerable review costs and ensuring consistency by not having different reviewers apply different responsiveness or privilege determinations to the same file (e.g., one copy of a file designated as privileged while the other is not may cause a privileged file to slip into the production set).  Deduping can be performed either across custodians in a case or within each custodian.

Everyone who works in electronic discovery knows what “deduping” is.  But how many of you know what “reduping” is?  Here’s the answer:

“Reduping” is the process of re-introducing duplicates back into the population for production after completing review.  There are a couple of reasons why a producing party may want to “redupe” the collection after review:

• Deduping Not Requested by Receiving Party: As opposing parties in many cases still don’t conduct a meet and confer or discuss specifications for production, they may not have discussed whether or not to include duplicates in the production set.  In those cases, the producing party may choose to produce the duplicates, giving the receiving party more files to review and driving up their costs.  The attitude of the producing party can be “hey, they didn’t specify, so we’ll give them more than they asked for.”
• Receiving Party May Want to See Who Has Copies of Specific Files: Sometimes, the receiving party does request that “dupes” are identified, but only within custodians, not across them.  In those cases, it’s because they want to see who had a copy of a specific email or file.  However, the producing party still doesn’t want to review the duplicates (because of increasing costs and the possibility of inconsistent designations), so they review a deduped collection and then redupe after review is complete.

Many review applications support the capability for reduping.  For example, FirstPass™, powered by Venio FPR™, suppresses the duplicates from review, but applies the same tags to the duplicates of any files tagged during first pass review.  When it’s time to export the collection, to either move the potentially responsive files on to linear review (in a product like OnDemand®) or straight to production, the user can decide at that time whether or not to export the dupes.  Those dupes have the same designations as the primary copies, ensuring consistency in handling them downstream.

So, what do you think?  Does your review tool support “reduping”?   Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.